skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In brief it comes down to cost of capital.

There is X cost to holding debt, and Y cost of holding cash.

The cost of debt is pretty clear - its the interest rate.

The cost of cash/equity is the opportunity cost of what you could be doing with it. (Either invest or spend it on growth or if none of the above are viable, then give it to the investors who can use it more effectively)

A CFO's job is to figure out the lowest possible cost of capital the firm can obtain, by having the right loans and investments and cash on hand as required.

Many companies may even find carrying debt to be cheaper than holding cash.

Doing moral good is a great thing, but its not part of the remit.

Now if you had a firm which does "good". You would usually do that through a different set of vehicles - you could support a foundation (which has tax breaks too! so makes even more sense).

There are lots of ways you can incorporate moral good into your daily activities and there are many incentives by the government to encourage such behavior.

Very few incentives though (if any) are centered around the concept of repaying loans to the govt faster so that they could * hypothetically* use the loans for something else equally or more worthy.

Especially since govt loans are usually part of a programme that has a corpus decided by legislation which matters more to disbursement than repayment.
Why can't you link to divs on a page? When I'm given a page range, I don't typically first go to some arbitrary page in the middle of a range.
>>I study in one of the largest universities in India. It is also fairly reputed within the country as well as outside.

Doesn't matter. Great colleges in India are about campus hiring, not education.

>>During my 2nd year of engineering we had to complete a programming "mini project". If you're familiar with these you may know the quality of most projects...

:) You made feel nostalgic.

>>The clear instructions from the professor were to use only Visual Basic or Java.

and then..

>>I went to him to ask if it was OK to do a "web based", "database-enabled" & "User Interfacing" application. To say that he was agitated would be a euphemism. It was like I had insulted him. To placate him, I respectfully pointed out that it was perfectly okay for me to use a language that I was comfortable in and that a web-based project was in fact a norm.

Cardinal sin!

Golden rule of such places. Just do as he says, because the idiot feels great power in his fingers and can ruin your whole education because he can't stand a guy more intelligent then him.

Additional Advice: Since you are about to graduate and come out soon. Let me tell you there are many people in the industry who are just like your professor. They have their pets in their projects and their own way of running things. If you fall out of favor of such guys you lose the game.

>>To avenge the dishonor I had brought him, he bullied another member of my group to leave my group just an hour before the demo to an external professor (a professor from some other college who is invited for the demo and viva voce).

Its more like 'Raju Rastogi' from 3 idiots, if you act like Rancho the principle is likely to advice him to join chatur.

>>I was dumbfounded when I found it on my report card that I had failed getting only 10% of the total allotment for the project and the re-hashed project managed to score 90% and above.

Hardly surprising. I was expecting this end in the very beginning at the start of your post.

>>The sad thing is most of my colleagues didn't even try to code or come up with an idea. Even sadder is the fact that if you do, the professors make sure to take it personally and pull you down instead of motivating or giving a helping hand.

More sad thing, They are likely to placed before you, and may even get a better compensation than you can.
From what I can see, rust is borrow more functional language features: its generics implementation seems to be similar to Haskell's type classes.
Ask PG: Why is your website with a constrained width but not HN?
Your website http://paulgraham.com/articles.html , being constrained in width, is a firm acceptance of the typography rules that advocate containing the width of text lines strongly. So why is HN almost full-width, where the uppermost comments have the most width and get almost hard to read?
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Yes. Maybe not exactly the same thing (because as the author mentions, technology is an ever-changing field), but it's very interesting to see and adapt to that change as it is happening. Especially now when the tech sector is at the core of everything around us.
I'm nearly fifty and have found things get easier as you age. The things I used to worry about in my twenties just aren't on my radar now.
none of the things you said describe a mechanism for how hft can topple society / endanger markets / other non specific harms.

seriously, reread your comment. now apply it to online shopping, telephone systems, satellites, air traffic control, etc. it applies to literally everything involving technology. should it all be banned?
I looked at the Nottingham University leak on Tuesday. The leak actually just contained the database schema and not the contents of the database. But it also contained the URL which could be abused to do an SQL injection. I tried adding an apostrophe to one of the parameters in the URL and an SQL error was returned. That page appears to be down now. One of the tables looked like this:

| courseCode | varchar(25) |
| dob | date |
| email_address | varchar(50) |
| first_name | varchar(25) |
| ID | int(11) |
| last_name | varchar(25) |
| lastupdated | date |
| orgnameID | int(11) |
| orgnameother | varchar(50) |
| student_id | varchar(25) |

Probably not massively useful data. Unless you want to perform a spear phishing attack, pretending that you're the University. Then it would be very useful.

EDIT: This was the Student Union database. I'm not sure how many students it would contain. Maybe a small number? Maybe all of them?
Yes, because I can't guess what the world will be like in 20 years time, but I am 100% certain that I'll want to be working with the insanely powerful computers that we have then.
Seems reasonable that bald people seems to be percieved more masculine, men as well man as women. Although I'm not sure if baldness makes those people more atractive. I think it's that they did something unusual. They gained more self confidence and people love self confidence.

In fact, I have dreadlocks and people like it, because I look healthy and self confident. I think it's even better than bald head. In XXI century agression is no longer advantage - charisma and inteligence are much more efficient these days.

However, a bit of masculine look may help women, they seem to look very atractive with no hair. Maybe not every woman, but I know women that looks good with no hair.
Doppio: A JVM in Coffescript
Sorry, just noticed your query. He plays alone - I've asked him if he's interested in the multiplayer aspects, but he just likes building things like automated mines, and watching replay movies on YouTube.
No. I'd like to be retired before 50. I'll probably still code when I retire, but it will be in something like Mathematica or R while I sit around learning subjects that interest me.
EU is very good.
Your prof was a douche. Perhaps he required some special language to get through to him but you never know.

I know profs who would be more than happy that someone took some initiative.

At the same time the same prof was completely cognizant of how the game was played.

When I took a course and answered like a sane person, he held his head in his hands and directed me to a few students who reminded me that a 5 point answer was a minimum of 1 page of regurgitation.

I had even more fun when I spoke to the bio med students. I remember their jaws dropping to the ground when I described how I had worked on an autoclave/run gels and generally had fun running genetic experiments over summer break.

Their final project? Making ghaghras and perfect pineapple juice - because the board had decreed that graduates should have some "usable skills once they are in the real world."
Designing in the browser is for losers
Thats pretty cool - I like the reviews down the right hand side...
Gamechangers: Steve Jobs. A Bloomberg Bio
The ratio I was talking about was the debt/ebitda ratio. See e.g.:

http://www.investorguide.com/article/11088/tesla-tlsa-crashe...
There are numerous intangible benefits to these programs beyond the success rate of the businesses. Jobs get created, technology is invented or improved, and supply chains and support networks are created or are made more efficient. While VC's might only care about the balance sheet, the government isn't in this to make money, they are in this to make our lives better.
org-mode comes with HTML/pdf/DocBook export and you can extend the exporter with your own formats.
for each pixel coordinate and color, output an offset and color. Not sure how it is impressive.
I don't get it, what's the problem on writing good handcrafted (no WYSIWYG editors) LaTeX?!
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Ex-Nokia team to launch a new phone...
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Though it's not connected to the comment you commented upon but I recently tried buying some music at one of my country's leading online stores (Flipkart) and the MP3s (no choice of other formats) were of poor quality and without any ID3 tags or so. After almost a week's <me-customer support-me> game, I gave up and acquired the songs from TPB (or IPT maybe). This time there was no guilt :-)
If you were providing services to AWS - that would "be doing business in US". I don't see how renting a service (AWS) from Amazon is "doing business in US" any more than would be buying a book from Amazon.com N'est-ce pas?
How To Create XML File in JAVA - (DOM)
Create XML File in JAVA
and see 10 similarly situated investments fail totally to sell this one company for $200 million 5 years from now.

That's the important point. Lots of VCs aren't really investing in a company, but are aiming to have invested in the next Google or other large tech company. They are playing blackjack.
Of course the first thing I did was to look for the French "grandes ecoles" (Polytechnique, HEC, ENA, mine-Sciences Po, etc…). But they're are not officially classed as universities, due to their highly selective process (French universities have a principle of non-selection) they are not included in this ranking. Which to anyone who knows about them is clearly preposterous, especially when far less illustrious French universities are listed in the top 100. Also really bizarre to see Warwick classed at #157 - it’s top for economics in the UK, and has very strong law, history and engineering departments.

Irrespective of their stated calibration criteria, I'm left feeling that "amount of money thrown at university by wealthy alumni" and "general reputation as measured by number of mentions in Hollywood films" are the strongest criteria here, not the level of education actually received.

Practical value is therefore marginal at best. A much more useful analysis would be by subject, across all institutions.
Ask HN: Any HN peeps in Shanghai? Want to meet up?
I'm in Shanghai for about a month (all of october) & I would like to get a taste of the startup life over here. Who do I get in touch with? Which meetups should I go to?

I'm also co-organizer of the Hacker News Cologne (Germany) Meetup & sometimes we set up a long-distance skype chat with other startup-minded people. We did that with the US & it worked out great. Anyone (or maybe a company / group / meetup) in Shanghai up for this?
One advatage that the NHS has in the UK
Unlike Tellus where nothing is lethal.
I think thats very much personal preference.

As a user, I almost always prefer the browser version. The main reason for this is that the browser controls are always there. For example, forward and back are always there, save for offline reading, and bookmarking is always there. Always in the same place.

I've tried a few native apps for news and social sites, but I've removed almost all of them because I found them harder to use than the browser. Some other people seem to love native apps though.
Because the alternative is writing javascript shudder.
Ek Mukhi Rudraksha 
The King of Rudraksh beads is the Ek Mukhi Rudraksha bead/One Faced Rudraksha bead. Ek Mukhi Rudraksha represents Lord Shiva. 1 Mukhi Rudraksha is more commonly found in half-moon shape or it can bring you immense power.

http://www.rudrakshacollection.com/ek-mukhi-rudraksha.htm
That just sounds like a karma farming middle-of-the-road comment that no one actually believes because it's so obviously flawed.

What if you want to measure something obviously incapable of being boiled down to a single figure yet you do it anyway, in which case it's OK to create a valueless arbitrary scale and call it fact even though it's clearly balanced in favour of reflecting what you hoped it would? That isn't a valuable endeavour and to analyze and encourage it is just validating absurdity.
Start programming using Object Pascal Language
Types of Brainstorming
I'm not really sure what that article is saying, maybe "Placeholder / bingo card arguments make it hard to have a rational intellegent debate/conversation". Which is technically true, it does make it hard to have an intelligent conversation.

However, in the vast majority of conversations about topics like this, the debate is not intelligent. The same old tied tropes and clichés come out. Many different people have commented "But he's racist too!" (on a recent post about gender at a tech conference many people dismissed the author for being angry).
Absolutely! I'm 46, I have been programming professionally for 21 years, and I still love it.

I think we're lucky to be in such a creative and interesting profession where you get to learn lots (and it pays comparatively well too).

I've written about the joy of programming in "Why I Love Coding" http://henrikwarne.com/2012/06/02/why-i-love-coding/
Does Agile mean no deliberate design?
Even the gzipped version is 49kb.
I'm excited to see all the other folks in this thread who say they're 50 and they're programming! I've been worried that because everyone _else_ thinks "large scale, high stress programming" -- i.e., the kind of programming that's _fun_ -- is a young man's (or woman's) game, I won't be able to have a job like the one I have when I'm 50, and I might need to find some other career I enjoy in order to continue having a job I enjoy when I'm 50.

I'm not looking for advancement, since advancement would be out of programming and into management, nor a pay raise, since programmer salaries are already plenty high. I just want to be doing exactly what I'm now doing in thirty years.
Same here as well. Same amount of time, also. You just have to be judicious in who you choose as your clients.
You should join the Dynamite Circle -

http://tropicalmba.com/innercircle

It's a great online community of location-independent entrepreneurs, including lots in Southeast Asia and Europe too.

From the guys behind the LBP -
http://lifestylebusinesspodcast.com
Highly depends on your criteria. It is pretty common to judge universities through their academic research performance, especially for the prestigious ones, and "grandes ecoles" are pretty terrible in that departement (except for 'ecoles normales', but those are pretty specific).

I also consider the level of education given at grandes ecoles to be pretty poor, especially in the prestigious ones. Once accepted in one, you are pretty much guaranteed to get the diploma, and in many of them, you can get out by cheating or studying a couple of hours before the exams. I doubt this changed since I was a student there 10 years ago.

In economical terms, GE are much more about signal than human capital.
I think it is very important to understand the "real" differences in what it means to program vs. manage. In programming in most cases you are working on projects. Once you deliver the code that project is essentially over (minus support and bug fixing of course). In a management role many of the key activities never really conclude. For example, resource allocation overall and amongst various projects, is something depending on circumstance, you may have to revisit on a weekly or monthly basis. So you don't get the satisfaction of "delivering" anymore and items stay in your inbox much longer. This for me is the key difference.
If Nokia has (supposedly) better map data than Google, how much money could be made by licensing that data?

Alternatively, how much could be made by creating a map application for the major mobile platforms, and sell it to the consumer direct? (bundled free with Windows Phone, no doubt) Probably not as much as a licensing deal, but still no small amount.
Lazarus 1.0 : First Impressions
Facebook to launch promoted posts in the US
It isn't automatically invalidated just because the results aren't in line with people's preconceptions.
Yes I do but we'll all be writing genomes by then.
The interesting thing, which to me at least speaks to intent, is that there would be an understandable reason for him to omit it:

The judge didn't follow through. She asked him about the first case he mentioned, and then moved on without asking if there were any more.

If this was a totally innocent slip, the most believable excuse to me would be that he wrongly assumed that since the judge moved on, she had satisfied herself of what mattered with respect to his experience with trials and did not see a need to concern herself with any other ones, and that he did not know of Samsungs ownership interest in Seagate, and so did not see a specific reason to mention that case and he also found it embarrassing.

Instead he's inventing an excuse that is directly contradicted by the transcript, that is just serving to make the whole thing look more dubious.

At the same time, though, it seems quite inept of the judge to not dot the i's by being precise enough to ask even "any more?" or similar before moving on. Surely a trial judge ought to know that people make stupid assumptions about what a question means all the time.
I'm glad to see this happening, as someone who's been following the "visual novel" form for some time. But like those and the original "choose your own adventure"s, they seem largely to be aiming for the lowbrow audience. I've heard suggestions that it's harder for an author to maintain the integrity of a vision when offering a branching story; I hope that's false and we'll see a growth in more literary content as authors become more familiar with the form (as has happened with visual novels to some extent).

Done right branches can be very immersive, increasing the impact of a story dramatically. While legitimate copies are very hard to come by these days, I highly recommend Phantom of Inferno if you are interested in this kind of storytelling.
"I don't like these benchmarks. They say nothing about how cool my users find my program. Only how fast it runs"

You are free to dislike a metric that does not (or not 100%) correlate with what you find important, but that does not make it a meaningless metric.
I know and have worked with coders in their 50s, even 60s. They were very much what I'd call 9-to-5 coders though. They were never given big, important or new projects but as a consequence were never expected to burn the midnight oil.

The main thing that looks unappealing to me about being a hacker decades from now is the constant cycle of learning. I'm on probably my 3rd generation upheaval. I've worked on a daily basis in a team of programmers with C, C++, C#, Java and Python. Getting familiar enough with those languages to do more than just tinker took a lot of effort - even for the languages that are pretty similar e.g. C# and Java. I'm now looking to do more front to back website coding (away from pure desktop/server stuff) so I'm trying a few things out before choosing on the main stack of technologies I need to master.

In my early thirties I still have the enthusiasm to do this but I find it hard to picture doing the same ten years from now with the same smile on my face.
The amounts are published by Kickstarter and they're the ones collecting the money and passing it to the project, so there's no question that they're correct.
The complaints had to do with the delivery of the product after the project was funded.
Posting for a friend who wishes to remain anonymous:

I'm a mechanical engineering by education and one thing I have noticed is there are no such options available for mechanical engineers. I remember sweating it out at the workshop fabricating a continuous variable transmission (automatic transmission) unit by hand from scratch.

I went on to work with a "leading education company" in India and we rolled out an "innovative" program for engineering college students. I was fresh out of bschool and was mainly involved in preparing the presentations to be presented to the top management.

The plan was supposed to connect the student community with the industry to facilitate final year projects for "free". I was happy because this entire "outsourcing of projects" was always one of my pet peeves. I later found out that the real plan was to do the above, but do it slowly and when the students were running out of time, make them pay up and "sell" them a project.

The service didn't take off and boy was I secretly glad!

What did I learn from the exercise?

1. There is a booming industry to sell projects.

2. There is immense demand. The moment we started
advertising, we got tens of thousands of calls every day.

3. The students just want to get done with the projects. Why? They already have job offers from one of the various software companies and this is just a formality to get their degree certificate.

4. They just aren't interested.

5. We approached engineering colleges as part of marketing and most directors/principals we met were @$$holes who asked us just one question - Will this help me get more admissions for the next academic year?

6. Most HODs wanted a cut out of the entire deal.

7. Demand for projects (in decreasing order) EC>EE>CS/IT>EI>Mech/Civil

I do not know the solution to this problem, but the entire ecosystem is flawed.
Their signals are cancelling out because they are in phase, this is a thing. It describes what is happening and why. You are arguing semantics here more than a technical point here, from my perspective. I agree with the physical reason, just because it is simple does not mean you cannot have a term for it in the case.
Their business model is undoubtedly ads. But I think that's slightly different from saying they are an ad company. As far as I can tell, the primary reason that Google exists is for clever technical people to do new geeky stuff. They need a way to fund that geeky stuff and that's where ads come in, but the ads and the revenue aren't where their real passion seems to be. If they could simply sit back and watch the $$ rolling in through ads without ever doing another bit of innovation, I doubt they would do it.

This is quite different from the vast majority of companies. BP, for example, don't exist because their peope are passionate about drilling oil - it's because drilling oil is a very good way of making money. Even companies like MicroSoft exist (and pretty much always existed) primarily as a money-making business. Sure they attract lots of nerds, but the money driven the company's choices of where to deploy those nerds.
We’re hiring a web app developer | Cozy(South Park in San Francisco)